Dialogue around curatorial practice

ArtsEverywhere published an essay by Yaniya Lee this week entitled “Tactics and strategies of racialized artists: some notes on how to circumvent the art world’s terms of inclusion.” Working as an editor on the piece, I had the privilege of thinking alongside Lee as she enumerated a few of the strategies that she and her peers use to jam a cultural machine that oftentimes only wants the perspectives and practices of BIPOC artists/writers/cultural workers to the extent that they can represent diversity. She asks, “What if all of the inclusive and diverse exhibitions that have been curated, all of the critical essays that have been written, and all of the self-congratulatory diversity panels and talks that have been hosted ultimately had no effect whatsoever on the structural make-up of cultural institutions in Canada?” And then she answers back with a toolbox of tactics that tend to the self-determination of BIPOC artists while simultaneously destabilizing structures that operate under false pretences of neutrality. Instead of inclusion within these same old systems, Lee proposes to dismantle their ideological foundations through processes of complication, care and refusal, serving the rise of something else in the wake. Something otherwise.

A long time in the making, I am thrilled to share information about I continue to shape, an exhibition I have curated that will open at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto this September. Produced under the tremendous guidance of Barbara Fischer, this exhibition will feature works by Maria Thereza Alves, Cathy Busby, Justine A. Chambers with Deanna Bowen + Ame Henderson + Jessica Karuhanga, Nicholas Galanin, Maria Hupfield, Lisa Myers, Mickalene Thomas, Joseph Tisiga and Charlene Vickers.

Expanding upon a longstanding interest of mine, the central concern of this exhibition is how the propositions embedded within artistic practices can act as gravity around which new ways of being in relation can coalesce. Consider this: history, like all stories, is told slant, subject to distortion by those with the power to represent it. In the telling, certain characters are foregrounded and certain power dynamics are obscured, leaving certain other characters—their perspectives and experiences—cast out of this immortal glow. And yet, it seems that aesthetic practices bear a specific capacity to transform the sediment of history into something moving once again, to puncture what seems solid, to redirect the light.

I continue to shape looks to the practices of artists as a means of working toward futures otherwise. By challenging colonial habits and tending to the labour that such re-orientation implies, these artists envision expanded aesthetic and political narratives, alternative forms of community building and belonging, and propose survival strategies up to the tasks at hand in shaping a world more tender, more just and more unsettled than the world we have now.

If you are in Toronto this autumn, please join me at the opening on 05 September 2018, 6–8 PM, which will feature a performance by Charlene Vickers. The show will remain up until 08 December 2018, with a robust slate of public programs along the way, including activations, talks and workshops.

Come and let’s consider how else to understand our role in upholding or dismantling the structures we have inherited, and how we are capable of shaping personal and cultural relationships anew.

I’ve had the luck of seeing Krista Belle Stewart’s video installation Seraphine, Seraphine twice: first at the Esker Foundation in 2013 as part of the Fiction/Non-Fiction exhibition, and then again in 2015 at Mercer Union in a solo presentation of the piece. In the five years since I first experienced Stewart’s work, which is kind of biography of her mother, I have continually come back to it as a profound articulation of strength and resistance, and as an example of what effects art might produce through encounter.

What if a decolonial, Indigenized Canada is made from the twinned imperatives of decolonization on the behalf of settlers and self-determination on behalf of Aboriginal peoples? While these processes are inextricably bound yet distinct from each other, their conjunction recognizes the fact that a decolonized future must start with the self-determination of Indigenous people: despite the fact that decolonization is the task of the colonizing settler, it is not settler-articulated. Decolonization demands a robust relationality between settler and Indigenous populations, and most important for the task at hand is the capacity of settlers to listen, to receive, to be deeply uncomfortable, to recognize themselves as estranged from the skewed history presented in textbooks, to feel alienated from a sense of righteous belonging and to cede powers and privileges that have been ill-gotten.

There is so much profound work to be done in regards to making some sort of decolonial future possible—cross-culturally, legally, spatially, aesthetically, and in regards to repatriating land and resources to Indigenous communities—and it is my sincere belief that cultural forms, such as this work by Stewart, are part of what will make these endeavours legible to the many people that now call this place home, settler and Indigenous alike.

We encourage submissions from practitioners who demonstrate a sustained commitment to the advancement of social justice in their work. We encourage programming that holds anti-colonial practices, collective practices and pedagogical practices as fields of action; that centres methodologies of shared accountability and care; and that actively resists inherited colonial legacies, systemic racism and gender discrimination. Reflections on institutional responsibility and accountability are encouraged.

My relationship with this institution has transformed me, and I am thrilled to be part of the jury for this residency. Perhaps this place and this opportunity could transform you too…

So long ago now, I remember picking up a copy of Afterall—a journal that showcases in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists, as well as essays on art history and critical theory—from the University of British Columbia bookstore. I picked it up because I was someone who loved language and wanted to know more about art, and this was the one art mag that featured more words than pictures. I still have that copy kicking around, so many years later, so many different homes and different cities later.

And just this month I received the latest copy of Afterall in the post, which features an essay I have written about the practice of Rebecca Belmore. In the nerdiest way, that young women of before is thrilled today to see my writing in those pages. It has been a total honour to engage with Afterall’s editors, and the invitation to consider Belmore’s practice could not have come at a better time. The essay, entitled “Picking Up a Long Line,” charts the ways that Belmore’s practice has provided an anchor for feeling my way through all the awful shit that #MeToo and Times’ Up and Not Surprised have brought to the surface, socially and intimately. Not that any of this is new, but that it has been hard to find my way sometimes. As I say in the essay:

Belmore reminds us of our complicity in the unfolding of stories like this: what duty do we have to bear our suffering on each other’s bodies? How to carry the burden that trauma produces? These questions resonate with stark clarity today. What to do with the public accounting of how power and violence are wielded to demean others? What to do when the naming begins, both the naming of perpetrators of these violences and the naming of those whose lives have been altered by them?

In Belmore’s practice, I am reminded that this kind of social grappling and reconfiguration has been going on for a long long time, and that although the correlation isn’t perfect, that something like Not Surprised needs the long history of Belmore’s practice to be possible at all. Like so much else in life, it is the labour of BIPOC women that lead the way in making an otherwise possible. That young women of before, and this woman I am now, cannot be more thankful that there are such fierce precedents for how to be in relation to what can no longer stand to be.

I am headed to Montréal this weekend for an event with the phenomenal Ashon Crawley entitled The Lonely Letters: On the Hammond B-3 Sense and Sound Experience. Collaboratively programmed by myself and Pip Day, The Lonely Letters will be hosted at SBC Gallery as a preface to SBC’s upcoming programme, which will be rooted in the practices of care, study and deep listening, while considering the potential and limits of institutions. If you are around Montréal on Saturday afternoon, come join us…

The Lonely Letters is an in-progress text of autobiofiction in which writer and philosopher Ashon Crawley collectively considers the relationship of quantum theory, mysticism and blackness through an engagement with the noisemaking practices of Blackpentecostal spaces. In focusing on the relationship between the Hammond B-3 organ and sense and sound experience, Crawley will perform a meditation between friends, and between would-be lovers, about how the performance of and the listening to the Hammond B-3—and its chord changes, arpeggios, volume, timbre and tone—can elucidate experiences of black social life. The Hammond B-3 organ is an under-thought instrument, despite its presence in Blackpentecostal spaces before church services begin, throughout their duration and after their end, punctuating the sounds of praise, prayer and preaching. Building on the work in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2017), this performative lecture will attempt to build connective tissue between what might seem to be disparate ways of thinking worlds known and unknown—the religious and the scientific, the noisy and the musical—with hopes of considering the epistemologies of quantum physics as Blackpentecostal.

Ashon Crawley is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black studies, performance theory and sound studies, philosophy and theology, and Black feminist and queer theories. His first book, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2017) is an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imaginings otherwise.

A couple years ago, Heather Anderson and Sandra Dyck of the Carleton University Art Gallery reached out to see if I’d be interested in writing a catalogue essay for an upcoming mid-career retrospective of Meryl McMaster‘s work. Meryl’s photographs have often compelled long and slow looking, and so I was excited to say yes and have a formal opportunity to put language to the way her images work on me. As things go, it turned out that the other essayist for the catalogue was to be my dear friend Gabrielle Moser. We travelled to Meryl’s studio together and spent a day in midst of stories with her, spinning two complementary but distinct takes on Meryl’s practice for the publication. Although we were looking at the same pictures and heard the same stories, I learned so much from Gabrielle’s framing and analysis of Meryl’s practice. And so, the sweet ending to this story is that Gabrielle and I were jointly awarded the Ontario Association of Art Galleries‘ award for curatorial writing (2000–5000 words) for our essays that appear in the Confluence catalogue.

Said the jurors: “[Gabrielle Moser’s and cheyanne turions’s] essays reflect complementary texts that examine Meryl McMaster’s process and elaborates on the artist’s self discovery through photography and performance, shedding light on how these two mediums intertwine in the artist’s work. The two texts are constructive and open-ended analyses of the in the makingness of the artist’s practice.”